Las categorías estéticas griegas Armonía

As I have already argued in this thesis, Gaskell’s Unitarian beliefs inform her construction of Englishness, which is, frequently, undogmatic and progressive, embracing changes coming out of the Industrial Revolution. Gaskell’s Englishness also assumes an inherent goodness in humankind, and is thus optimistic about social change within England. It is conscious of social injustices against the ‘other’ within English society, and seeks to include those ordinarily excluded from notions of Englishness. Gaskell’s identity as both Unitarian and female also underpins her Englishness as it contributed to the imagining of masculinity and Englishness in the nineteenth century. In Gaskell’s context, the English male body was frequently seen as a trope for English, male control, both at home and abroad in the empire, although, as Donald E. Hall also points out, this trope was an ideological construct which should be seen as part of wider hegemonic struggles of the mid-nineteenth century (10).

Gaskell played a role in fashioning prevailing constructions of middle-class masculinity and of Englishness through her writing, but we will also see that, as a Unitarian and as a woman with proto-feminist sympathies, her contributions in this respect had a particular bias towards an inclusive Englishness in which she interrogates the narrow boundaries of the Englishness of her period that prevented the admittance of women and also many men into its ‘in group.’ As we will see in this chapter, Gaskell’s writing endorses an Englishness that includes women and also men who did not ‘fit’ regular definitions of masculinity in the nineteenth century.

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In Gaskell’s depictions of English masculinity, she optimistically foregrounds a slowly evolving English social system in which those in the ‘out group’ of nineteenth-century Englishness assimilate the behaviours of the ‘in group,’ the middle classes. I begin my discussion of this by focusing on her proto-feminist sympathies and will briefly consider one of her essays, “Company Manners,” which exemplifies Gaskell’s frustrations with the separation of gender spheres in Victorian England which effectively excluded women from Englishness. I will then concentrate on changing and widening definitions of gentlemanliness in the nineteenth century, and how Gaskell uses these to employ her own notions of Englishness as she applies principles from the ‘Muscular Christianity’ and the Christian Socialist movements, social developments that resonated with her Unitarian faith. In this analysis I concentrate on the following texts: North and South, which includes a discussion between John Thornton and Margaret Hale about the qualities of a gentleman, and Wives and Daughters, with its focus on social change, and with one of its main characters, Roger Hamley, of ‘old’ blood but educated at Rugby. I will also discuss two short stories published in the Christian Socialist magazine and in the period of Gaskell’s involvement with this movement, “Christmas Storms and Sunshine” and “The Sexton’s Hero.” Each of these stories exemplifies Gaskell’s perspective of widening the parameters of the ‘in group’ of Englishness by assimilating more men into a form of middle-class Englishness. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of Ruth, and suggest that, also in this novel, Gaskell argues for a more inclusive Englishness by implying that the ‘true’ Englishman in this novel is the hunchbacked dissenting minister, Thurstan Benson.

166 Maleness, Masculinity, Manhood

However, before embarking further on this discussion of masculinity and Englishness in Gaskell’s writing, I need to define a number of basic terms used in this chapter. I employ Herbert Sussman’s definitions of maleness, masculinity, and manhood in their distinctions between biology (maleness) and socially constructed gender (masculinity or manliness, since the terms are interchangeable), and with their emphasis in the Victorian period on control and self-discipline. Sussman distinguishes between the terms male (or maleness), which in the Victorian period was “thought of as innate in men” (12-13), and the terms masculinity and manliness, which he defines to be “multifarious social constructions of the male current within the [Victorian] society” (13).¹⁴⁷ He argues that this distinction is “especially important for the Victorians for whom the hegemonic bourgeois view defined manliness as the control and discipline of an essential maleness fantasized as a potent yet dangerous energy” (13).

Sussman goes on to argue that he defines manhood as “the achievement of manliness, a state of being that is not innate, but the result of arduous public or private ritual and, for the Victorian bourgeois, of continued demanding self-discipline” (13). Sussman’s emphases on evolving definitions of masculinity and the possibility of achieving manliness in the nineteenth century are helpful in a discussion of Englishness since they help explain the fluidity of definitions of Englishness in this period, and also Gaskell’s vision of movement between classes in which men from both upper and lower classes move towards the concept of masculinity as defined by the middle classes.

147 Walton, in her recently published book on models of manliness in the novels of Charlotte Yonge, chooses to use manliness in preference to masculinity because “masculinity is the twenty-first century’s preferred word” (6) whereas manliness reflects the preferred terminology of the Victorian period. However, like Sussman, I use both terms interchangeably.

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I also use John Tosh and Susan Walton’s important contributions to scholarship on masculinity in the nineteenth century to structure my analysis of how Gaskell’s portrayal of masculinity affects her notions of Englishness. Tosh argues that masculinity’s focus in the Victorian period, which was largely about control and authority (Man’s Place 89), found expression in its emphasis on moral attributes such as courage, and a work ethos that emphasised taking on responsibilities in both the public and private sphere (Manliness 83-102). Drawing on Tosh’s scholarship, Walton states that “manliness for the Victorians contained desirable moral characteristics that all men should aim to acquire: courage, determination, readiness to work at useful tasks and to take familial and political responsibilities” (6). In this chapter, I argue that these characteristics of masculine courage and determination, a readiness to work, and the assumption of responsibility are intertwined with notions of Englishness in Gaskell’s fiction, where she foregrounds the possibility of being admitted into the ‘in group’ of Englishness if these characteristics are practised by those (such as the working classes) who are normally considered to be outside of Englishness. Tosh writes:

Boys became men not only by jumping through a succession of hoops, but by cultivating the essential manly attributes – in a word manliness. Energy, will, straightforwardness and courage were the key requirements. Sometimes there was an implied claim to natural endowment; more often a manly bearing was taken to be the outcome of self-improvement and self-discipline. This aspect was explicit in what was for the Victorians the key attribute of manliness – independence. The term . . . suggested autonomy and opinion. (Man’s Place 111) Improving the self was thus paramount to achieving manliness in this period. It was the way that the eighteenth century feminized gentleman could refashion himself as masculine in the

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nineteenth century (Cohen 315). Indeed, adopting the codes associated with masculinity and gentlemanliness (interchangeable terms in the nineteenth century) served as a ‘bridge’ to middle-class notions of Englishness (Colls, Identity 77). Walton, too, notes that the values of

“courage, determination, readiness to work at useful tasks and to take familial and political responsibilities” crossed class lines by being worthy qualities for which all men should strive (6). Manliness could thus be learned and was, at least in theory, accessible to men of all classes.

Gaskell’s Proto-feminism

Gaskell constructs masculinity from a proto-feminist perspective. Valerie Sanders includes Gaskell’s writing in her observation of the “steady decline in classically heroic male characters” in English novels in the nineteenth century, where few heroes end up with their pride and ego intact (96).¹⁴⁸ Indeed, Gaskell’s leaning towards feminism, and, as I discuss below, her relatively independent life as a Unitarian, influenced her inclusive vision in her depictions of Englishness in which she alludes to the exclusion of women from normative understandings of English identity. Gaskell’s personal involvement with nineteenth-century feminist activity included friendships with both older and younger participants in the growing women’s movement, including the fiercely independent and single-minded Florence Nightingale and the Winkworth sisters, Emily¹⁴⁹, Susannah, and Catherine, intellectual women whose education included tuition in Greek and Latin from William Gaskell (Easson,

148 Sanders argues that anti-heroes in Gaskell’s fiction include: Mr. Benson and Mr.

Bellingham in Ruth, Philip Hepburn in Sylvia’s Lovers, Harry Carson in Mary Barton, and Osborne Hamley in Wives and Daughters.

149 Emily Winkworth’s married name was Emily Shaen.

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Elizabeth Gaskell 20).¹⁵⁰ Elizabeth Gaskell sympathised with the plight of women of her period (Nestor 36), as seen, for example, in her support for and signing of Barbara Leigh Smith’s petition on married women’s property rights in 1856, as well as her approval of campaigns for female education and employment (Uglow 311).¹⁵¹ Susannah Winkworth commented to Gaskell that men “have so many paths to turn to [whereas a woman] often has difficulty finding one on which she can work without doing more harm than good” (qtd.

in Uglow 163), and notes to a friend that “[Gaskell] and her friends seem to have just such notions about these matters as we have” (qtd. in Uglow 163).

Gaskell’s sympathy for feminism may be attributed, at least in part, to her Unitarianism, a faith that placed great emphasis on individual freedom and equality in marriage (Uglow 78). Gaskell never played a typically submissive role in her marriage, signing her name, for example, as Elizabeth Gaskell rather than Mrs. William Gaskell. Further, Unitarian tradition differed from mainstream thinking in that the husband was not considered to be responsible for his wife’s actions. William Gaskell, therefore, did not question the right of his wife to hold her own opinions even if they differed from his own, and defended the publication of an ‘offensive’ novel such as Ruth, despite it being burned by various male members of his congregation (Perkin 266). Gaskell commented to Tottie Fox in a letter that “I don’t believe that William would ever have commanded me” (Letters 109).

Moreover, Gaskell also had personal autonomy over much of the income earned from her writing. Wishing to extend her European holiday in 1858, for example, she quickly wrote two

150 Other friends included older feminists such as Fanny Wedgewood, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, and Mary Howitt, who called for change as early as the 1830s. She also became a mentor and friend of many of the next generation of feminists who formed the Langham Place Group, including Tottie Fox, Bessie Parkes, Barbara Leigh Smith, Adelaide Procter, Anna Mary Hewitt, and Miranda and Octavia Hall.

151 See Robin B. Colby’s “Some Appointed Work to Do”: Women and Vocation in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell (1995) for more on this topic of women and vocational independence.

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stories for Dickens’ Household Words, “& asked for immediate payment, in order to obtain money to gratify this wish” (Letters 534).¹⁵² Her final independent business transaction just prior to her death was the purchase of a house in 1865, a present for William. Gaskell was also unusually independent, in having remarkable freedom for a mid-nineteenth-century middle-class wife and mother of four young, dependent daughters, being frequently away from home (and family) either on holiday or holed up somewhere, writing. The conclusion to North and South, for example, was written at Lea Hurst, the Nightingale family’s country estate.

In her essay titled “Company Manners” (1854), Gaskell suggests that the parameters of Englishness should broaden beyond normative definitions of masculinity and include women, too. The backdrop to “Company Manners” is twofold. First, it is Gaskell’s response to Victor Cousin’s Madame de Sablé. Etudes sur les femmes illustres et la societé du dix-septiéme siècle, written in 1854 about Madame de Sablé¹⁵³ and other “celebrated French women of the 17^th century” (CM 295), and promptly read by Gaskell in that same year (Jumeau 16). No doubt Gaskell noted the freedom of these intellectual women to speak with men at the French salons about literature, science, and philosophy. A further contributing factor to “Company Manners” was Gaskell’s formative friendship with Mary Clarke Mohl, an English woman living in Paris, whom Gaskell had already met in England.¹⁵⁴ Gaskell and

152 “Right at Last” (initially published as “The Sin of a Father” in Volume 18, 27 November 1858); and “The Manchester Marriage” (initially published as “A House to Let” in Household Words’ Extra Christmas Number, 1858).

153 Madame de Sablé was a seventeenth century French writer whose literary salons influenced writers such as François de La Rochefoucauld.

154 Despite her French connections, Mohl was, as noted by Gaskell in a letter to Tottie Fox,

“English in spite of her name” (Letters 326). Mohl and Gaskell “belonged to overlapping worlds” (Lesser 37), sharing various friends, including Florence Nightingale, Eliza Fletcher, and Fletcher’s daughter, Margaret Davy, Sir James Stephen, and Grace Schwab (Lesser 37, Uglow 347-349, Yarrow 17).

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Mohl’s friendship became more intense during Gaskell’s first visit to Paris in 1853. Mohl was in many ways an extension of the formative influence on Gaskell of Eliza Fletcher’s salon gatherings in the radical ferment of Edinburgh in the 1820s. Not unlike Fletcher’s salons, Mohl’s salons, “with [their] brilliant conversations, scholarship, openness and oddity,” were irresistible to Gaskell (Uglow 349).¹⁵⁵ Mohl’s voice can be heard in “Company Manners” as well as two other pieces written in this same period, “My French Master” (1853) and

“Modern Greek Songs” (1854) (Uglow 349). The “English friend of mine [who is] English by birth, but married to a German professor” in “My French Master” (69) is most likely based on Mohl (Mitchell 449n29), as is the female character in “Company Manners” who colourfully pronounces “Bah! . . . Celebrities! What has one to do with them in society? As celebrities they are simply bores . . . The writers of books, for instance, cannot afford to talk twenty pages for nothing, so he is either profoundly silent, or else he gives you the mere rinsings of his mind” (298).

Gaskell is fascinated by these salons, which, she writes, are delightful social experiences in France, and dull and boring in England. She writes that “where we matter-of-fact English people are apt to put in praise of the morals and religion of the person whose life we have been writing” (CM 296), Cousin ranks of greater value a hostess who has “all the requisites [to be able to] ’tenir un salon’ with honour to herself and pleasure to her friends”

(CM 296). Gaskell recalls her “experience in English society; of the evenings dreaded before they came, and sighed over in recollection, because they were so ineffably dull” (CM 296), and aims in this piece of writing to reflect on what it was about French salons that made them socially stimulating, so that English society would “discover the lost art of Sabléling”

155 For example, Gaskell wrote animatedly of Mohl’s “amusing and brilliant” salons in a letter to Emily Shaen née Winkworth (Letters 750).

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(CM 296), of holding a salon where women can contribute to an intellectually stimulating conversation as did Madame de Sable in the seventeenth century. It indicates her frustration with England’s stuffiness and formality, with its rigid gender roles, dictated largely by the male elite, where women are treated as ‘other.’

Gentlemanliness

Gaskell questions the exclusion of women from notions of Englishness, and this emphasis on inclusiveness is also evident in how she depicts gentlemanliness in her writing. The link between gentlemanliness/masculinity and Englishness was not new in the nineteenth century, and shifts in definitions of gentlemanliness in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with changing notions of Englishness. Asa Briggs suggests that the concept of the gentleman is “the necessary link in any analysis of mid-Victorian ways of thinking and behaving” (Age of Improvement 411). In the eighteenth century, masculine identity was

“conferred, or denied, by men’s capacity for gentlemanly social performance” (Cohen 312), and, as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall argue in Family Fortunes, was “based on sport and codes of honour derived from military prowess, finding expression in hunting, riding, drinking and wenching” (312). On the surface, however, hegemonic masculinity in the eighteenth century was ultimately represented by politeness and refinement, associated with hereditary rank – the title of gentleman could be claimed by those of noble birth, as well as by clergymen, army officers, and members of parliament (Gilmour 3).¹⁵⁶ By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the meaning of ‘gentle’ in ‘gentleman’ had shifted, from rank and hereditary privilege, to “its modern sense of ‘tender’” (Gilmour 86). Manliness became

156 The word ‘gentle’ in gentleman originally referred to being of ‘gentle’ (or noble) birth.

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aligned with the capacity to show feeling; an example is Mr. Hale’s “deep, manly sobs” (NS 154) at the news of his wife’s illness in Gaskell’s North and South (Gilmour 86).

These changing definitions of gentleman meant that this social grouping included, at least in theory, a larger proportion of the English male population, including the developing industrial classes. Indeed, since the evolving concept of a gentleman emphasised behaviour patterns that could be achieved, this concept was able to span classes, and be, in Colls’

words, a form of “cultural capital transferable across the whole of society. It was the bridge connecting all polite classes” (Identity 77). Moreover, that this was a distinctively English phenomenon was observed by Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1856 that “if we follow the mutations in time and place of the English word ‘gentleman’ . . . we find its connotation being steadily widened in England as the classes draw nearer to each other and intermingle.

In each successive century we find it being applied to men a little lower on the social scale”

(qtd. in Gilmour 3). However, whilst there was a flattening of social codes in relation to masculinity, the emphasis on being a ‘gentleman’ in the Victorian period meant that masculinity was still represented in this period in elite (middle) class terms (Tosh Manliness 32). Michael Curtin writes: “those who wanted to learn aristocratic manners perceived the task not as a craven capitulation to a class enemy but as a worthy emulation of high standards” (413). Asa Briggs writes in relation to “the moral component of gentlemanliness . . . the problem was to widen the basis of qualification, without sacrificing the exclusiveness which was the source of the esteem” (Age of Improvement 411). Thus, to be a gentleman was the “ultimate benchmark” for middle-class men (Berberich 19).¹⁵⁷

157 This middle-class emphasis in English masculinity was also observed by a Dutch academic, G. J. Reinier, who lived in London in the early twentieth century: “by the English [Reiner] did not mean the working class, and he did not mean women, and he did not mean the other British. He meant the silent, unintellectual, conventional, and reserved

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This shift in the qualifications required for the status of gentlemen emphasised manners and morals. The foregrounding of masculine refinement and morals was linked in Victorian minds with England’s naturally superior civilization (Cohen 318). Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1883 that “if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind” (qtd. in Gilmour 1). Viewing gentlemanliness in racial terms ― as an English institution and a national contribution to civilization ― is also evident in this passage from the Cornhill Magazine in 1862, written by Sir James Stephen, Gaskell’s acquaintance:

The great characteristic of the manners of a gentleman, as we conceive them in

The great characteristic of the manners of a gentleman, as we conceive them in